The Tortoise was a dive of ill-repute down by the river. It’s clientele smelled worse than the polluted Melanski. The bluer than blue-collar workers drank there. Some were seasonal workers who picked berries in the summer and apples in the fall before heading to warmer climates for the winter. Most often it was filled with workers from the textile mills stopping in to warm their stomachs before heading home in the winter or to cool off with an ice-cold beer after a hot summer day.
Now, the heart of the Tortoise was Berwick’s population of drunks and ne’er-do-wells – a population that increased with the closing of the mills. They kept the seats of the bar filled from the time it opened for the graveyard shift workers still hanging on at the mills at 6am until its doors shut at 2am. Many were the nights Pete Smallman the rat-faced owner, allowed them to curl up in booths or around tables and sleep it off, confident they’d repay the kindness with a couple of rounds when they woke up.
The police spent a minimum of two nights a week at the Tortoise breaking up fights. Throughout the year brawls would break out between out-of-work drunks who needed a night away from home. In the summer and fall they sprinkled in bouts between the seasonal workers and the locals, who appreciated neither color nor foreign tongues.
It was inevitable the question of who was faster, a tortoise or a hare would come up, and then one of the regulars would turn on his stool and ask a seasonal worker if he thought, as a black man, he had cornered the market on speed. The other men at the bar would laugh and the seasonal worker, whether his English was good or not, would understand he was being offended and rise up to challenge the speaker.
Knives were frequent guests at the Tortoise and with the police would always come an ambulance. More than one combatant over the years had ended up down the road at Mt. Hope, its proximity to the bar a metaphor lost on the bar’s patrons.
Santiago Holmes was a regular at the Tortoise. He was there so often; he had his own stool in the darkest corner, with a two-stool buffer between himself and the next drinker. When he first started drinking, not when he had his first beer, or got drunk off champagne at one of his mother’s parties, but instead, after his parents were gone and he started drinking, he’d come to the Tortoise.
At the Tortoise if you looked old enough – even if you didn’t – and weren’t scared off by Little Jimmy, the massive tattooed cousin of Pete Smallman who worked the door with two knives in eight-inch leather sleeves riding on each of his hips, you could get in. His doughy gut, the black eyes that peered out from behind his bushy black beard and the knives had turned more than one aspiring underage drinker away.
By the time Santiago decided to stop drinking in his rooms above the garage, he’d been working for Pap for a month and had the rough, wiry look of one who spent their day at hard work. The layer of baby fat he’d had through high school melted away with the work and his face took on a more angular, hawkish appearance. He still possessed the arrogance of the elite, which gave him the courage to get past Little Jimmy for the first time at the Tortoise.
Up until that point, his journeys out in public consisted of trips to the grocery store, where he felt the burning hatred in the eyes of the unemployed mill workers’ wives as they passed food stamps or a few precious dollars into the hands of the cashiers. Though the trips were infrequent, he knew he was loathed. Pap took a certain amount of glee in recounting the town gossip he’d picked up over beers at the Tavern of whatever Gram brought home from her ventures into town. Santiago knew where he stood.
After a month, the edge seemed to come off the anger in the stories Pap told, or so Santiago felt. He was still young enough to think drinking alone wasn’t a good thing. Weighing those two ideas, he decided it was time to try and head out into the world for some company while drinking. The town couldn’t stay angry with forever him just because his last name was Holmes, or so his thinking went. Never having had to mix with the blue-collar majority of Berwick, he didn’t realize he could not have been more wrong in his assumptions.
The mill workers of Berwick kept desperate hold of their grudges, not letting go for anything, or anyone, even if the grudge had been resolved. In 1970, the mill workers went on strike for higher wages and a better pension plan. Mr. Holmes, already beginning to feel the financial strains, gave in within a week. More than 40 years later men would gather at the Tortoise and refer back to how ill-treated they had been in 1970 as they discussed their current financial straights.
So when Santiago passed by Little Jimmy and entered the Tortoise, all eyes fell on him. This was normal practice for anyone who entered the bar. What was not normal was the cold fury each set of eyes held.
Many would have crumbled under the weight of those glares, or at worst, have turned and left. Santiago, felt the rage in an instant, and realized people weren’t close to done with their anger. In that moment, he realized he would be treated as an outsider for the rest of his days. He also realized he didn’t give a damn.
He met each set of eyes with a fury of his own; the pent up rage of having been abandoned by his mother and deemed an outcast by a town that didn’t know him reflected back at these hard drinkers in the glare he cast upon them. He took his time, making sure he looked deep into each set of eyes, meeting their hate with his own, until they were forced to look away.
Having established that he would not be bullied, Santiago took the only available seat at the bar: at the far end from the door next to the bathrooms. Pete Smallman, who believed all dollars were created equal, placed a Bud and a shot of Jack in front of him.
As he would every night from that day forth, Santiago sat taking long pulls of his beer and short sips of the whiskey, staring hate out at the world until he felt the arms of drunkenness, calm some of his pain.
